Yes. My view is that they would want to convert most of the acquired base to FB. I do think Whatsapp has access to a large base of younger consumers that may not be FB users and they would try to convert them to users.zzm9980 wrote:Minimally, they acquire your contact network that isn't using Facebook. This is especially useful for those users that never shared their contacts. By using Whatsapp, you auto share your contacts. They just bought those contacts and connections.pisceangirl wrote:
With respect to my post on this thread, what I meant was that acquiring Whatsapp at this point does not allow Facebook access to any "linkable" information that it didn't have before the acquisition i.e they cant say that X Whatsapp number belongs to Y FB account, UNLESS of course they already had the info. Am I making sense?
If we don the tinfoil hat, we can go further and assume they're now collecting metrics on who you're messaging and the frequency of those messages. They probably have a lot of junk data (phone numbers) from those shared contacts people voluntarily submitted. They can easily use said metrics to identify active and inactive phone numbers for users. They can also identify who is "active online" and messaging people, but perhaps abandoned the Facebook service. It's a lot of useful data. $19billion USD worth? Not sure.
I'm not sure they would be able to greatly monetize Whatsapp in its "isolated" avatar.